Self Organizing Network (Self Organizing Network, SON) is a key topic research of standardization carried out by the 3rd Generation Partnership Project (3rd Generation Partnership Project, 3GPP) standard organization during the R8/9/10 working period, and the core concept thereof is to reduce conventional manual operations and reduce the operation and maintenance cost of network operators through automation processes at the stages of network planning, deployment, optimization and maintenance.
The SON itself integrates multiple automatic functions, including a Self Configuration (Self Configuration), an Automatic Neighboring Relation (Automatic Neighboring Relation, ANR), a Mobility Robustness Optimization (Mobility Robustness Optimization, MRO), a Mobility Load Balancing (Mobility Load Balancing), a Coverage and Capacity Optimization (Coverage and Capacity Optimization, CCO), a Cell Outage Detection and Compensation (Cell Outage Detection and Compensation, CODC), a cell Energy Saving (Energy Saving, ES). In practice, multiple SON functions rather than one SON function cooperate with each other to achieve one purpose, for addressing a network problem (e.g., debugging) or optimizing the network. This may cause an issue of how to coordinate the cooperating SON functions, i.e., how to avoid the different SON functions from performing conflict operations, setting conflict parameters or generating contradictory targets on one network entity (e.g., a base station, a cell).
There are some methods to coordinate SON functions in the conventional technology. The methods include: a conflict avoidance method (a prior SON function coordination, i.e., determining a possible executing conflict and optimizing an executing sequence of multiple SON functions before executing the SON functions, to avoid such a conflict before execution) and a conflict resolution method (a posterior SON function coordination, i.e., addressing by setting a task priority a conflict that occurs in executing the multiple SON functions). In the process of coordinating SON functions, each entity supporting SON functions (e.g., a base station, or an operation and maintenance system, i.e., a network management system) only knows about its own SON function configuration but knows nothing about SON function configurations of surrounding entities. In this case, an executing conflict occurs between a SON function of an entity and SON functions of surrounding entities if the SON function of the entity is configured as the same as those of the surrounding entities or the SON function of the entity is configured as different from those of the surrounding entities but a conflict relation is preset between the SON functions of the entity and its surrounding entities.